Detective Alaina Rivers never pictured her life ending this way. Yes, she was tenacious, and played hard in a man’s world. Yes, she was a like a dog with a bone—that she couldn’t let go of the one case she had been warned to forego. Her death in a thunderous downpour, in the middle of a major street in her native Memphis would make national news.

All news is not good news.

Life and people hadn’t been kind to Zachary Brick. He was a man who believed in loyalty and love, but both had always eluded him. At the height of his career, he walked away from a disloyal organization and did what prolific assassins for the CIA were incapable of doing—to hide in plain sight as a detective in a major city.

He would also walk away from the one woman who captured his heart, the detective with the tough exterior who knew too well how to soothe his troubled soul. He represented death and mayhem. She was the epitome of goodness, the calm that quieted the quaking volcano inside. His eventual departure was a gesture of his love.

Brick’s return will reveal that shadows of good and evil often share the same face, and will discover, nothing is ever black or white—even the steel blue wall of silence.

John Wooden